"I like the idea of very focused melodies, tight arrangements, commercial stuff. I said to
Charlie: "This is the only kind of music I want to make just now.
Let's try and go on the edge and do some real pop stuff." - Jim.

There had been an effective hiatus of four years after 1998's release of Neapolis and
Our Secrets Are The Same became stalled in legal limbo. Jim spent
those years in Italy, both in Sicily and then Naples with local dance-rock alchemists Planet Funk.
"Probably two years ago there was a lot of crossover between dance and mainstream artists, Bryan Adams
for instance, and two or three people were asking if I'd be interested in doing that. It's not really my bag but
I said I'd come along and check it out, and through doing that, the process started again."

Therefore it was decided to return with a more focused pop album i.e. short songs very heavy on melody, songs
really tightly focused in terms of arrangements.

"We started in January [2001], we made a decision of wanting to go for it and we got really
excited about the early demos. Comeback albums are clumsy things, we just thought "Let's just do some work." We
were really starting to work the creative muscles again in a low-key way." - Jim

The album was recorded in the last six months of 2001 in Sicily and Glasgow.

As a warm up for the new material, the band (Jim,
Charlie and the multi-instrumentalist
Gordon Goudie) recorded several covers. This separate project emerged as the low-key forerunner
album Neon Lights.

"In any modern recording, it's unavoidable to use some of the incredible technology that
is available now, and we ourselves relied very heavily on that same technology, I think in the most
positive sense. At certain times we three little studios on the go: one in Glasgow, one in Sicily and one
in Dublin. And by sending music files through the `net and such, we were able to enlarge our group." -
Jim

An early idea was to compose the album quickly with Jim only singing on two or three songs,
with Mark Kerr singing on the others.
In the end, Mark only added backing vocals to his own composition Face In The Sun.

The lyrics were kept deliberately simple and direct. This allowed the collaborations between the various nationalities to communicate
more effectively.

The Floating World was the first track to be released from the album.
It was uploaded to the official site under the erroneous title Disconnedit, and
released rather anonymously by
Absolutely Records under the psuedonym Taormina.

The album's title wasn't settled until the last minute. In Germany, the title was erroneously given as Spaceface
on their teletext service and tour posters.

"Cry was chosen as the album's title, not necessarily because as a song it
summed up the entire album - in fact I don't think one song sums up this
rather diverse album - but the cry in question for me... It's not a cry of
sorrow particularly, it could be a cry of joy. I just felt it was a very
sharp and focused word. "Cry" is a word and emotion that is understood
universally. And again, in keeping things as simple as possible. It
certainly leapt out as a potential album title." - Jim

The limited edition was the first format available. Featuring a deluxe card package,
and the Cry video, the limited editions
were limited to 5000 copies across Europe. It was followed by the standard jewelcased edition.

"In terms of themes of the songs, there are songs like New Sunshine Morning,
and One Step Closer, which if they're about anything in particular, they are
probably about an idea of some sort of rejuvenation, rebirth, and I felt
that in terms of getting involved in music again. It really did feel like a
new burst of energy." - Jim

Following from the experiment with Neon Lights, singles were released with non-album tracks as B-sides
through Eagle with contemporary and classic remixes being handled by Absolutely Records. A pattern of
releases saw the commerical Eagle release appearing first, with the remixes following a couple of months later.

The SACD version of the album arrived a year later, but was not noticably different.